When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (2000)

When I reviewed Ishiguro's The Buried Giant back in January of this year, I remarked that each one of his novels follows the conventions of a different genre. This one is ostensibly a detective story, but as it turns out it is more of a story about a detective.

As in all Ishiguro's novels, this is a first-person narration with the narrator turning out to be unreliable, in this case wildly unreliable. The narrator, Christopher Banks, recounts his memories of a golden childhood as an English boy living in Shanghai, until his parents are kidnapped one after another when he is nine. Sent back to live in England with an aunt, he attends boarding school and graduates from university before becoming a celebrated detective. (At least that's the way he remembers it. The reader becomes gradually aware that some of his memories do not seem to correspond with reality.)

When Banks returns to Shanghai, just as the conflict between China and Japan is beginning, to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearances, the narration takes a surreal turn, no longer even approximating reality.

For the first time in my reading of Kazuo Ishiguro (all but one of his seven novels), I found his habitual writing style off-putting. It is declarative, straight forward, even slightly stilted. That way of expression seemed to fit his other first person narrators, particularly in The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, but it just doesn't seem to fit with the education level and personality of this one. I suddenly became aware that perhaps Ishiguro has only one writing voice, and that his other novels have cleverly matched the narrator to the style rather than the style being determined by the narrator. Whatever. This is not a book I would recommend to others.